IC 331

IC 331 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Taurus about 321 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 85,000 ly, about 85% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,888 km/s.

Because its light is 321 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 331 as it looked roughly 321 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).